Music Performance Analysis: A Survey
It addresses the gap in MIR research by emphasizing performance analysis, which is crucial for understanding how listeners perceive music, but it is incremental as it primarily reviews existing work.
This paper surveys the field of Music Performance Analysis (MPA), highlighting that MIR often overlooks performance variations in favor of audio signals, and it discusses the significance and future opportunities for integrating performance analysis into MIR.
Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tends to focus on the analysis of audio signals. Often, a single music recording is used as representative of a "song" even though different performances of the same song may reveal different properties. A performance is distinct in many ways from a (arguably more abstract) representation of a "song," "piece," or musical score. The characteristics of the (recorded) performance -- as opposed to the score or musical idea -- can have a major impact on how a listener perceives music. The analysis of music performance, however, has been traditionally only a peripheral topic for the MIR research community. This paper surveys the field of Music Performance Analysis (MPA) from various perspectives, discusses its significance to the field of MIR, and points out opportunities for future research in this field.